“IT CAUGHT ON FIRE”:
A‘BOTTOM-UP’HISTORY OF THE URBAN CRISIS IN GREATER ST.LOUIS
Master’s Thesis in North American Studies
Leiden University
Douwe Schipper Student No.: 2371294
June 1, 2019
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. B. Rieger Second Reader: Dr. E.F. van de Bilt
2 CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ... 3
CH. 1: RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION: THE DELMAR DIVIDE ... 16
CH. 2: PUBLIC HOUSING: PRUITT-IGOE ... 27
CH. 3: DEINDUSTRIALIZATION: EAST ST. LOUIS, IL ... 38
CONCLUSION ... 47
3 INTRODUCTION
On August 9, 2014, the white police officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Missouri. This incident was followed by extensive local protests and riots, which, in turn, sparked a widespread media debate about racial inequality in the St. Louis area and nationwide. As part of that debate, the editorial board of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch remarked the following about the role of the past in the shaping of Ferguson’s future:
The coming months will test this community’s willingness to change for the common good. History says we can’t do it, but history has brought us to an uncomfortable place. History is cause. Changing history is now the cause.1
If history is indeed the cause, then changing history requires, first, a detailed understanding of the causal dynamics that rendered Ferguson, the wider St. Louis area, and American cities more generally prone to racial unrest. Urban historians have convincingly demonstrated how these dynamics, while racial and class-based in appearance, are embedded in a deeper postwar transformation of the American city: the so-called ‘urban crisis’.2
Urban crisis, which is the central theme of this thesis, refers to a number of inter-related phenomena that arose in numerous American cities during the second half of the twentieth century. These include suburbanization (often in the form of ‘white flight’) and corresponding depopulation and a decreasing tax base in central areas, physical blight, pollution, and increases in crime, drug addiction, poverty, unemployment related to deindustrialization, and racial inequality.3 Cities affected by this crisis were often, although not exclusively, located in the North East or the Midwest, an area sometimes pejoratively referred to as the ‘Rust Belt’; notable examples include Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, New York City (especially Brownsville and the South Bronx), Philadelphia, and – the subject of this thesis – St. Louis.4
1 “Overcoming History”. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 28, 2014: A10. Accessed June 14, 2019 via
newspapers.com.
2 Thomas Sugrue. The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996/2005/2014: 271; Richard Florida. The New Urban Crisis: Gentrification, Housing Bubbles, Growing Inequality, and What We Can Do About It. London: OneWorld, 2017: 171-172.
3 This description of the urban crisis is based on John F. McDonald. Urban America: Growth, Crisis
and Rebirth. London: M.E. Sharpe, 2008: Xv.
4 Tracy Neumann. Remaking the Rust Belt: The Postindustrial Transition of North America.
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In the nineteenth and early-twentieth century, St. Louis, which is strategically situated just south of the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, evolved into one of the Midwest’s most important commercial and industrial centers and one of America’s major inland ports. However, in the postwar period, the city began to grapple with typical characteristics of urban decline: rapid industrialization, depopulation, physical decay, suburbanization, and increasing racial inequality. Its population decreased from 856,96 in 1950 to 453,805 in 1980 (and further down to 319,294 in 2010).5 Throughout the twentieth century, St. Louis became one of America’s most racially segregated cities. Colin Gordon, who is perhaps the most notable historian on the decline of St. Louis, argues that the city is “a telling (and understudied) setting for understanding the broader patterns of modern urban history” and that it “is part of the modern urban crisis and, like a single cancerous cell, bears all the genetic markers of the larger disease”.6 Not only does St. Louis constitute a typical case, it is also interesting because of its
place in historiography; while it is not ‘over-researched’ like, for instance, Detroit, there is at least some secondary literature to engage with.
As I will illustrate more elaborately below, much of the historiography that tries to explain the urban crisis, including Gordon’s book on the decline of St. Louis, Mapping Decline, approaches urban decline from an economic and statistical perspective, and focusses on long-term, large-scale (i.e., structural) developments.7 This approach is achieved using particular types of primary sources, most notably demographic statistics and political records. In short, the emphasis lies on the structural factors that constrain human agency and produce daily life; these are explored through the specific set of primary sources that make this top-down construction most visible. While this approach has certainly been fruitful, it also creates a gap; it reveals little about cultural context and pays little attention to the agency and experience of ordinary individuals who experienced the urban crisis. In order to help fill this gap, this thesis refers to a different set of primary sources: documents that reflect personal experience or opinions, such as diaries, memoirs, interviews, and opinionated newspaper articles. My central question, then, is the following: does the integration of such documents into the pre-existing historiography lead to a different image of the St. Louis urban crisis?
The term ‘urban crisis’ was popularized by Thomas Sugrue, who postulated it as the central notion of his 1996 classic about the decline of Detroit, The Origins of the Urban Crisis.
5 United States Census Bureau, “U.S. Decennial Census”. Accessed November 18, 2014 at
https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html.
6 Colin Gordon. Mapping Decline. St. Louis and the Fate of the American City. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008: 8.
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Sugrue was the first historian to integrate racial variables with structural developments; he explains the transformation of Detroit as the result of three simultaneously occurring factors: the flight of industrial jobs, the persistence of workplace discrimination, and racial segregation policies in housing.8 As such, he concludes that the crisis can only be confronted if the complex and entangled histories of these factors are well understood. Much of the subsequent historiography on the urban crisis has adopted a similar focus on the interplay between race, politics, and economy.9 Arnold Hirsch’s Making the Second Ghetto (1998), for instance,
connects the political engineering of segregation in Chicago’s public housing sector to an emergent ‘pan-white’ identity.10 David Schuyler’s A City Transformed: Redevelopment, Race,
and Suburbanization in Lancaster (2002) embeds the failure of urban renewal programs in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the city’s struggle with its legacy of racial inequality and segregation.11 Robert O. Self’s American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland
(2003) links civil rights struggles for economic rights with the urban and suburban history of California.12
In addition to its focus on race, recent historiography on the urban crisis is characterized by an emphasis on historical structures and a general disregard for personal agency. Sugrue, for instance, focusses in particular on long-term, large-scale economic and spatial developments. He does not principally oppose subject-centered or ‘bottom-up’ explanations, and he does not deny the possibility and significance of human agency and individual motivations and behavior. Moreover, Sugrue occasionally engages in social and cultural historical research by focusing on the lived experience of the urban crisis. He does so most prevalently in his examination of the motives behind white flight, in which he analyzes the discourse of several white individuals who felt threatened by the economic implications of black migration into their Detroit neighborhoods. In this section, he even uses memoirs as a primary source.13 Overall, however, Origins overwhelmingly emphasizes structural developments: gradual shifts in the political landscape, abstract economic developments, and structural and institutionalized racism. Sugrue focusses on such structures not because he prefers the impersonal over the personal, but because
8 Sugrue, Origins, xxxvi-xxxviii.
9 Arnold R. Hirsch. Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940-1960. Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1998; Robert O. Self. American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005; David Schuyler. A City Transformed: Redevelopment, Race, and Suburbanization in Lancaster, 1940-1980. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2002.
10 Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto. 11 Schuyler, A City Transformed. 12 Self, American Babylon. 13 Sugrue, Origins, 215.
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of the particular nature of the urban crisis phenomenon, which is structural in the sense that it has manifested itself in a very similar fashion in many U.S. cities:
The emphasis in this book on economic and spatial structures is not meant as an alternative to [subject-centered] approaches, but instead as a context in which they can be best understood. Economic and racial inequality constrain individual and family choices. They set the limits of human agency. Within the bounds of the possible, individuals and families resist, adapt, or succumb.14
In his book on the decline of St. Louis, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (2008), Gordon adopts a similar preference for structural developments, or – as he characterizes it – ‘tracing patterns’, but he diverges from Sugrue’s philosophy of history in two main ways. 15 First, his structuralism is less holistic; he has a rather narrow interest, namely
in how developments in the political realm yield structural demographic trends. Second, as its title suggests, Gordon’s Mapping Decline revolves around maps, i.e., visual representations of data. Much of that data is numerical. Thus, whereas Sugrue underscores his arguments with a balanced combination of qualitative and quantitative examples, Gordon prefers to draw primarily on statistical evidence.
Notwithstanding these differences, it is clear that Gordon and Sugrue both operate within a wider historiographical tradition that prefers to consider urban history from the viewpoint of social structures rather than from the perspective of individual agents. Historian Peter Burke characterizes this philosophy as ‘holist’, and contrasts it with ‘methodological individualism’, which asserts that the social is reducible to individual actions.16 Holists are
sometimes accused of misrepresenting the exercise of power as a unilateral, top-down process; creating a false dichotomy between perpetrators and victims; and having a general disregard for instances of human beings making their own history.17 Indeed, Origins and Mapping Decline neither interrogate historical developments from multiple perspectives nor acknowledge a plurality of identities in the shaping of urban reality. Rather, they focus predominantly on the individuals and institutions that they perceive to be in control of structural urban dynamics,
14 Sugrue, Origins, 5.
15 Gordon, Mapping Decline, 13.
16 For a more elaborate discussion of the debate between methodological individualists and holists, see
Peter Burke. History and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005: 127.
17 Burke, History and Social Theory, 127; Alex Callinicos. Making History: Agency, Structure, and
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which, in practice, are all white and usually affluent and male. Gordon does so most explicitly; with his focus on public and private policymaking, he attributes agency only to those who were formally in (governmental or corporate) power. Sugrue cites several groups that determined the course of Detroit, “corporate executives and managers, labor unions and their rank-and-file members, federal, state and local governments, individual white Detroiters, and black Detroiters”, but he asserts that the latter were “far less powerful than employers, white workers and homeowners”.18 As far as Sugrue does analyze identity, he seems interested only in the
cultural construction of whiteness.19 Black identity is implied to be less interesting because black people, as victims of circumstance, were too constrained to use their identity and exercise agency.
Sugrue’s allusion to a lack of black power is indicative of a second problematic aspect, present in both Origins and Mapping Decline: the failure to incorporate cultural context. Cultural expression constituted an important means through which black people – often deprived of economic and political power – reacted to their marginalization and obtained (imaginary, mystical, spiritual, political or even, in the case of, for instance, successful jazz musicians or street artists, economic) power.20 In other words, black people used culture to exercise their agency, and therefore, cultural analysis is necessary to adequately address black agency. Importantly, analysis of black culture does not equal cultural explanations of poverty (discussed more elaborately below), which assert that a tendency toward poverty is somehow inherent to black culture.21 As both Sugrue and Gordon rightfully indicate, black poverty is a much more complicated phenomenon, with its primary roots in structural marginalization and oppression.22
The important point is that these structural developments emerge in equally complex cultural contexts, and generate an array of multifaceted cultural responses grounded in the agency of individuals experiencing poverty. Some recent work in urban history has attempted to approximate such responses. For instance, in his attempt to explain the historical foundation of the Ferguson riots, Richard Rothstein cites the story of a black man, Larman Williams, in
18 Sugrue, Origins, 12.
19 See especially chapter 8, “’Homeowners’ Rights’: White Resistance and the Rise of Antiliberalism”,
in Sugrue, Origins, 209-230.
20 Saadi A. Simawe. “Introduction: the Agency of Sound in African American Fiction”. In Saadi A.
Simawe (ed.). Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison. New York: Garl and Publishing, Inc., 2000: xxiii.
21 This kind of explanation is put forward in, for instance, Edward C. Banfield. The Unheavenly City:
The Nature and Future of Our Urban Crisis. Boston: Little Brown, 1968; Franklin E. Frazier. The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1939.
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order to illuminate how racial policymaking was undertaken and responded to.23 This thesis will further investigate the potential of illustrating such abstract developments with concrete examples of individual agency, experience, and cultural expression. I will do so through the prism of the postwar history of St. Louis, Missouri.
In Mapping Decline, Gordon describes how St. Louis became an independent city with fixed boundaries in 1876. Therefore, when the urban area began to expand in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, new streetcar suburbs such as Richmond Heights and University City became independent municipalities within the separate St. Louis County. This resulted in the creation of a politically fragmented Greater St. Louis area. The processes of suburbanization and political fragmentation continued throughout the twentieth century. Gordon argues that the concentration of separate political bodies in one metropolitan area resulted in a constant dynamic of competing urban agendas and policies, which, in turn, framed the course of urban development. In a politically fragmented urban area, the cross-municipal movement of people, along with their income and capital, results in shifts in municipal tax bases. This makes municipalities in which capital is concentrated increasingly powerful and desirable and simultaneously reinforces the decline of economically stagnating municipalities. In St. Louis, as in many other American cities, that self-reinforcing mechanism materialized in the form of white flight, first to the inner-ring streetcar suburbs and later even further into the county.
Because political fragmentation made regional urban planning impossible, the fate of twentieth-century St. Louis depended on intra-municipal policies, which, in practice, prioritized the interests of its private property-owning inhabitants over the common, cross-municipal interest of economic and racial equity.24 In practice, the intent and effect of these policies were highly racialized: “what these policies shared – across the metropolitan area and across the full sweep of the twentieth century – was the conviction that African American occupancy was a blight to be contained, controlled, or eradicated”, argues Gordon.25 Such policies (which are discussed in more detail in chapter 1) were sometimes public (e.g., zoning ordinances) and sometimes private (e.g., blockbusting, redlining). Combined with other circumstantial variables, such as deindustrialization and the absence of a geographical boundary to sprawl (e.g., an ocean or a mountain range), racialized policymaking turned St. Louis into one of the most graphic and sustained versions of the urban crisis.26 It is now one of the nation’s most
23 Richard Rothstein. “The Making of Ferguson”. Journal of Affordable Housing & Community
Developmental Law. 24.2 (2015): 165-204.
24 Gordon, Mapping Decline, 12. 25 Gordon, Mapping Decline, 12. 26 Gordon, Mapping Decline, 11.
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segregated metropolitan areas, with Delmar Boulevard functioning as an invisible economic and racial barrier between predominantly white and relatively affluent St. Louis to its south, and predominantly black and relatively poor St. Louis to its north. The impact of this ‘Delmar Divide’ on local residents constitutes the central theme of chapter 1 of this thesis.
Racial segregation is not the only challenge that postwar St. Louis has faced. The city’s central area and its inner ring suburbs have long been visibly blighted and partially abandoned. Its municipal population has been decreasing dramatically for decades, while the population of the overall urban area, which includes the city’s politically autonomous suburbs, increased in the period between 1940 and 2000.27 Urban renewal efforts, such as the infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex, invariably yielded the adverse effect of more decay, sprawl, and racial inequality. I examine the history and ultimate decline of Pruitt-Igoe in detail in chapter 2. The conditions inside this project, which was opened in the early 1950s in order to provide adequate housing to former inhabitants of inner-city slums, began to deteriorate by 1958. The buildings were ultimately demolished between 1972 and 1976. This fate subsequently became viewed as a profoundly significant historical event, a critical juncture that marked the transition from the optimism of high modernism to the anarchy of postmodernism. For instance, in 1977, cultural theorist Charles Jencks famously proclaimed that the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe signaled the death of modern architecture.28 Furthermore, in 1982, footage of Pruitt-Igoe was featured in Godfrey Reggio’s cult film Koyaanisqatsi. The film examines the interplay between human technology and nature through juxtapositions of slow-motion images with music composed by Philip Glass. It dramatically shows some of the Pruitt-Igoe buildings were demolished using explosives as Glass’s composition reaches a climax, thereby underscoring the cultural importance of the event.29
The weight of such publicity attached to Pruitt-Igoe encouraged a widespread debate, among scholars and journalists alike, about the cause of its failure. Early commentators followed Jencks in blaming the failure of Pruitt-Igoe on architectural negligence. Oscar Newman, for instance, argued that there existed a relationship between environment and behavior, and that the crime that occurred on the Pruitt-Igoe premises was directly caused by its public space being ‘indefensible’ and too massive and chaotic to encourage residents to
27 Gordon, Mapping Decline, 11.
28 Charles Jencks. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. New York: Rizzoli, 1977: 9-10. 29 Koyaanisqatsi. Directed by Godfrey Reggio. 1983.
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maintain it or safeguard it from vandalism and violence.30 Katharine G. Bristol’s seminal paper “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” (1991) firmly rejects the architectural explanation, and points instead to contingent, economic and institutional as well as racial causes, such as poor and racist policymaking and a decreasing tax base due to depopulation in St. Louis.31 Bristol argues that “by placing the responsibility for the failure of public housing on designers, the myth [of architectural failure] shifts attention from the institutional or structural sources of public housing problems”.32 After Bristol’s paper was published, architectural explanations fell out of
fashion. Elizabeth Birmingham, for example, contends that architectural explanations like Jencks’s completely ignore the profoundly important issues of race and poverty.33 Similarly,
the prominent 2011 documentary film The Igoe Myth argues that the decline of Pruitt-Igoe is best understood in a changing urban-economic, not architectural, context. Specifically, the enormous housing deficit that a flourishing St. Louis faced in the late 1940s had turned into a housing surplus in the impoverished and depopulated St. Louis of the 1960s. This eliminated the middle-class need for public housing, leaving projects like Pruitt-Igoe partially abandoned and occupied by only the poorest segment of the population.34
Other early commentators, both in the popular press and in scholarly discourse, explained the failure of Pruitt-Igoe as the result of the behavior of its black inhabitants.35 The most prolific scholar adhering to this model was perhaps Lee Rainwater, who summarized the implicit paradigm behind his 1970 book Behind Ghetto Walls as follows:
White cupidity creates structural conditions highly inimical to basic social adaptation (low income availability, poor education, poor services, stigmatization), to which Negroes adapt by social and personal responses which serve to sustain the individual in
30 Katherine Bristol. “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth”. Journal of Architectural Education, 44.3 (1991): 167;
Oscar Newman. Defensible Space. New York: MacMillan, 1972: 56, 58, 66, 77, 83, 99, 101-108, 188, 207.
31 Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth”, 163-171. 32 Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth”, 163.
33 Elizabeth Birmingham. “Reframing the Ruins: Pruitt-Igoe, Structural Racism, and African
American Rhetoric as a Space for Cultural Critique”. Western Journal of Communication, 63.3 (1999): 291.
34 The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: An Urban History. Directed by Chad Freidrichs. 2011.
35 A. Scott Henderson. “’Tarred with the Exceptional Image’: Public Housing and Popular Discourse,
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his punishing world but also generate aggressiveness towards the self and others, which results in suffering directly inflicted by Negroes on themselves and on others.36
This model draws on Oscar Lewis’s concept of a ‘culture of poverty’, which posits that poverty is sustained in certain groups across generations because the cultural values of people experiencing poverty perpetuates their condition.37 In the late 1970s, William Julius Wilson famously reformulated Lewis’s culture of poverty concept with the notion of a black ‘underclass’. According to Wilson, patterns of behavior (joblessness, crime, welfare dependency, single-parent homes, etc.), common among poor black people, reinforce their marginal position.38 Most of the recent urban historiography – both on public housing and on the urban crisis more generally – rejects the culture of poverty thesis and the underclass category. These scholars implicitly adopt Herbert J. Gans’s argument that the derogatory and moralistic undertone of such notions obscures the structural source of urban problems.39
Instead, as already noted above, scholars like Sugrue and Gordon redirect their attention to larger economic and political structures.40
Within that prevailing structuralist paradigm, a notable recent phenomenon is the emergence of suburban history as a distinct subfield. Historians of suburbia, such as Robert E. Bruegmann and Thomas J. Vicino, challenge the overly simplistic dualism of the notion of the suburb as a white and affluent counterpart of declining inner cities.41 Thereby, they reveal the essentializing qualities of the traditional paradigm of urban history, which divides socio-geographical space into cities, suburbs, and rural areas.42 Indeed, as I will illustrate in chapter 3, which describes the urban crisis in St. Louis’s industrial suburb of East St. Louis, Illinois, St. Louis’s urban crisis did not simply spread from the center, only to affect inner-ring suburbs over time as well. Instead, the crisis formed and spread according to contingent geospatial
36 Lee Rainwater. Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum (e-book edition). New
York: Routledge, 1970: 181. N.B.: page numbers in the references to this book reflect the e-book edition.
37 Oscar Lewis. Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty. New York: Basic
Books, 1959.
38 William Julius Wilson. “The Black Underclass”. The Wilson Quarterly, 8.2 (1984): 88-99. 39 Herbert J. Gans. “From ‘Underclass’ to ‘Undercaste’: Some Observations About the Future of the
Post-Industrial Economy and its Major Victims”. In Enzo Mingione (ed.). Urban Poverty and the Underclass. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1996: 141-152.
40 Examples include Gordon, Mapping Decline; Bradford D Hunt. Blueprint for Disaster: The
Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009; Sugrue, Origins.
41 Robert Bruegmann. Sprawl: A Compact History (paperback edition). Chicago/London: University
of Chicago Press, 2005/2006.; Thomas J. Vicino. Transforming Race and Class in Suburbia: Decline in Metropolitan Baltimore. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
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patterns, without regard for the different categories that humans construct to subdivide their habitat. The twentieth-century history of East St. Louis (similar to, for instance, Philadelphia’s industrial suburb of Camden, New Jersey, or Detroit’s satellite city Flint, Michigan) embodies this decentralized nature of the urban crisis phenomenon.
The suburban history of the urban crisis as well as the other arguments and narratives outlined above are part of a wider historiographical discours(e) on the urban crisis, a semiotic and cultural system or conversation in which several texts about the urban crisis are produced and negotiated. Combined, the specific texts that this discursive system incorporates produce a prevailing view, a ‘big picture’, about the decline of American cities. As I have indicated above, this prevailing view usually explains the urban crisis as the result of macroeconomic forces, poor policy choices, and structural, institutionalized racism. This structuralist explanation has become highly authoritative, permeating and dominating not only scholarly debates but also mainstream media accounts and other types of popular discourse.43
As with any other discourse, this historiography of the urban crisis is one of ‘power-knowledge’ relations: power makes use of knowledge in order to legitimize itself, but it also produces that very knowledge in accordance with its own ideology. For instance, historians of the urban crisis mobilize their power in order to establish that economic and statistical primary sources and structural analysis become the main methodological tools within the discursive system. At the same time, these historians also utilize this methodology in order to persuade others of the truth of their inferences, and thereby to establish their epistemic authority. Power-knowledge dynamics determine which texts the wider discourse will incorporate and which texts it will ignore. The attribution of power to specific individuals or institutions is not always intrinsically motivated, but instead often based on arbitrary variables, including the epistemic authority of the knower – which, again, is reproduced in the process of knowing.44 The contingent lines along which power operates, in short, informs the course in which the field of knowledge develops.45
43 A prominent example of a popular-scholarly book that examines the interplay between racism,
policy and economy is, for example, Michelle Alexander. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York City: The New Press, 2010.
44 The function of the reputation of the knower in the making, maintenance, transmission, and
authority of knowledge is further explored in Steven Shapin. The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010: 4.
45 This conception of discourse is based on Michel Foucault. The Archaeology of Knowledge and
Discourse on Language. (transl. A.M. Sheridan Smith) New York: Vintage Books, 2012; Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality. Vol 1: An Introduction. New York: Random House, 1990.
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Surely, the structural approach that urban historians employ has been fruitful and important, for instance, by revealing the irrationality of blaming poverty on the poor. Nonetheless, the pre-eminence of this methodology is ultimately contingent on an arbitrary power-knowledge interplay. A different, not necessarily inferior or superior, type of methodology may yield markedly different insights. In this thesis, I focus on the potential of documents that reflect personal experiences or opinions as a different category of primary source. More specifically, I will use testimonies that appear in diaries, memoirs, interviews, and opinionated newspaper articles. This choice of primary source is partly motivated by the fact that I am unable to access American archives because I am writing this thesis while being physically located in the Netherlands. Diaries, interviews, and newspaper articles are not commonly used by urban historians, yet easily accessible at a distance; they are often digitized or appear in books or documentary films that are available in libraries worldwide.
Many of these testimonies appear in egodocuments, items that primarily convey autobiographical memories,which can be defined as personal recollections of episodic events (e.g., the decline of one’s neighborhood) and nonepisodic facts (e.g., one’s childhood address).46 Importantly, such memories are not necessarily accurate. Instead, memories are incomplete and, more often than not, partially fictional. In addition to the original event or fact, they reflect contextual variables such as the culture in which they were produced and the recollecting subject’s position in his or her life cycle.47 Moreover, because memories are narrations of past events, they add a literary element to the events.48 Thus, autobiographical memories are not objective representations of the past – and historians should not treat them as such.
In addition to ego-documents (which convey memories), I will use testimonies that convey a personal perspective or opinion. These should be treated with similar caution. Opinions, much like memories, are narrated interpretations of cultural, economic, political, and social realities and provide no segue into historical reality per se.49 Nonetheless, both memories and opinions constitute a particular type of text that, much like any other type of source, aims
46 Daniel L. Greenberg, Lauren L. Deasy, and Amelia L. Zasadski. “Autobiographical Memory”. In:
James D. Wright (ed.). International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 2. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015: 282-288.
47 Geoffrey Cubitt. History and Memory. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007: 76. 48 Arianne Baggerman, Rudolf Dekker, and Michael Mascuch (eds.). Memory, Family, and Self:
Tuscan Family Books and Other European Egodocuments (14th-18th Century). Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2014: 2-3.
49 A useful example of the biases and discursive strategies that underpin an opinionated editorial is
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to represent the past objectively and impersonally. Moreover, the mediums in which they appear constitute a type of text that urban historians usually ignore. Thus, within the larger aim of this thesis – which is to nuance the discourse on the urban crisis by adding a previously neglected type of text or representation to it – memories and opinions are legitimate objects of inquiry.
The question is, then, whether and how the history of St. Louis’s urban crisis derived primarily from analysis of memories and opinions differs from the traditional, structuralist historiography. To be sure, it is impossible to provide a completely new ‘big picture’ within the bounds of a single thesis. Therefore, within the wider focus on St. Louis, I will conduct three smaller case studies into specific aspects of St. Louis’s urban crisis, namely residential segregation, public housing, and suburban deindustrialization. I decided to specifically investigate these three aspects after a preliminary glance at the available primary source material; each aspect surfaced repeatedly throughout the various diaries, memoirs, interviews, and newspaper articles I found.
The thesis is structured as follows: each aspect is considered in a separate chapter. Thus, chapter 1 examines the effect of the urban crisis at the level of the residential neighborhood. Specifically, it considers the emergence of the Delmar Divide. It also looks in detail at the impact of this divide on the residents of North City. Chapter 2 explores St. Louis public housing and considers specifically the failure of Pruitt-Igoe. Finally, Chapter 3 investigates the cultural impact of suburban deindustrialization by examining the situation in East St. Louis, Illinois. In each of these chapters, I contrast the view that emerges from the testimonies I use with pre-existing historiography. In this way, I reveal several factors that shaped the life and experience of St. Louisians, and yet remain underexposed or are misrepresented in historical accounts. Thereby, instead of providing a new metanarrative, I simply give examples of new insights that emerge from or are suggested by my research. In doing so, I hope to start a conversation about how urban historians’ choice of source material shapes the narratives they produce about the urban crisis.
A final word about the chronology and time frame is in order. Contemporary historiography tends to have a revisionist view of the chronology of the urban crisis. Both Sugrue and Gordon argue that the process of urban decline started much earlier than usually assumed. Scholars have traditionally situated the beginning of the urban crisis in the 1960s (most accounts do not speak of an ending, implying that the crisis continues into the present). Sugrue, however, argues that the period between the 1940s and the 1960s “set the stage for the
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fiscal, social, and economic crises that confront urban America today”.50 Gordon locates the roots of the crisis even earlier, arguing that demographers have failed to recognize the economic and demographic boom that hit St. Louis in the years surrounding World War II as a temporary distraction from a downward spiral that had its roots already in the 1920s.51 In any case, it is clear that the urban crisis is a long-term phenomenon. Because of this protracted nature and because documents that are accessible at a distance are relatively scarce, I have decided not to confine my inquiry to a short and limited period, and instead aim to explore primary sources from all of the postwar decades. This, I hope, will help illuminate a degree of continuity between current urban events, such as the Ferguson riots, and the history that served as the cause.
50 Sugrue, Origins, 4-5.
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CH. 1: RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION: THE DELMAR DIVIDE
J. Rosie Tighe and Joanna P. Ganning characterize the St. Louis of today as a ‘dual city’, because it features spatial segregation according to race and income between its northern half (‘North City’) and its southern half (‘South City’). North City is currently 97% black, while South City is 62% white.52 This racial divide corresponds to a significant difference in income and capital, reported by Tighe and Ganning as follows:
Median Annual Income Median Home Value
‘North City’ (97% black) $21614 $44922
‘South City’ (62% white) $30725 $75556
Income and home value statistics for the northern and southern sides of St. Louis City, with Delmar Boulevard as the dividing line.53
Moreover, a 2018 report issued by Washington University in St. Louis found an 18-year gap in life expectancy at birth between the 63105 ZIP code in the Clayton area in the southern part of St. Louis County and the 63106 ZIP code in North City – areas that are less than 10 miles away from each other.54
Delmar Boulevard is commonly identified as the dividing line between these two parts of the city (hence the name ‘Delmar Divide’).55 As such, the street is considered a ‘key marker’ of the racial and economic disparities in the St. Louis region.56 In this chapter, I examine two elements of the Delmar Divide. First, I explore the historical practices – redlining, zoning, and blockbusting – that helped solidify and sustain the divide. Second, I investigate the impact of the emerging divide on residents of rapidly transforming neighborhoods. In both instances, I use different types of testimonies (memoirs, interviews, and op-eds in newspapers) in order to introduce new, bottom-up perspectives into the existing historiography.
In St. Louis, rigid patterns of racial segregation in residential neighborhoods first emerged during the First Great Migration (1916-1940).57 In this climate of demographic
52 Tighe, J. Rosie, and Joanna P. Ganning. “The Divergent City: Unequal and Uneven Development in
St. Louis”. Urban Geography, 36.5 (2015): 657.
53 Tighe and Ganning, “The Divergent City”, 658.
54 Nancy Cambria e.a.. Segregation in St. Louis: Dismantling the Divide. St Louis, MO: Washington
University in St. Louis, 2018: 5.
55 Tighe and Ganning, “The Divergent City”, 658; Ian Trivers and Joanna Rosenthal. “A Picture is
Worth 930 Words: The Delmar Divide”. Focus on Geography, winter issue (2015): 199-200.
56 Trivers and Rosenthal, “A Picture”, 199. 57 Cambria, Segregation in St. Louis, 16.
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change, several intentional strategies to promote such segregation took hold. Local municipal governments as well as private individuals and enterprises employed such strategies.58 The most notable of these practices were redlining, zoning, and blockbusting.59 During the Second Great Migration (1940-1970), these practices continued. Coupled with the rise of fragmented and competing suburbs from the late 1940s onward, the practices helped solidify the Delmar Divide as it exists today.60
Historians sometimes suggest that redlining, zoning, and blockbusting occurred under the radar, remaining largely invisible to the public eye. According to this narrative, the invisibility of these practices was due to the fact that they were devised in distant political and entrepreneurial spheres rather than the public sphere. For instance, Gordon argues that “discrimination […] was often hard to disentangle from other elements of a loan or an insurance application […] and the costs of doing business in long-neglected central cities”.61 On the other
hand, the testimonies I consider below suggest that there was a great deal of knowledge about discriminatory practices available to the public, as well as a great deal of resistance against them. In other words, through public discourse about discriminatory practices residents of affected neighborhoods enacted a certain degree of political participation. This is a significant insight because it shows how the urban history of economic and racial inequality is not just one of affluent and white rule, but also one of poor and black resistance. In what follows, I will treat redlining, zoning, and blockbusting separately and give examples of resident awareness and resilience for each of them.
Redlining is an example of a private policy – employed by banks and realtors – that creates and sustains spatial segregation between different demographic groups. It refers to class-based and racialized patterns in banks’ investment decisions. Usually, banks exercise redlining by investing in certain neighborhoods while refusing to invest in others and by providing certain demographic groups with loans and mortgages while refusing these services to others. Importantly, these investment patterns are not based on evidence-based risk assessment, but rather on subjective demographic prejudices. Redlining then creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in which redlined neighborhoods enter a vicious cycle of economic decline because of a lack of investments.62 In St. Louis, redlining was a common practice throughout much of the twentieth century. A 1934 redline map (Fig. 1) shows that realtors already engaged in the
58 Gordon, Mapping Decline.
59 See chapter 2 and 3 in Gordon, Mapping Decline, 69-111, 112-153. 60 Cambria, Segregation in St. Louis, 47.
61 Gordon, Mapping Decline, 107.
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practice in the 1930s. The map outlines the city’s ‘Negro Districts’, presumably in order to mark where it was appropriate to provide services to black people and where it was not. The map also shows the different districts of St. Louis city, each along with three statistics: the total number of black people, the percentage of black population in the district, and the percentage of total city black population represented by that district.
Fig 1: A 1934 redline map.63
By the 1970s, the existence of redlining had become a topic of debate in local academic and political discourse. This is illustrated by the angry reactions to a 1979 study about redlining that was funded by the Missouri Savings and Loan League and carried out by researchers from St. Louis University. The study had denied the existence of redlining in St. Louis and had thereby exonerated lending institutions of the charge, as issued by St. Louis community groups, that they consciously withheld loans and mortgages to certain demographic groups. In response, Missouri State Senator J.B. Banks argued that “the persons who made the statement that there isn’t any red-lining just must be insane”, adding that “I guess it’s understandable that if you go out and commission a study, you get what you’re looking for”. 64
63 “Map of the City of St. Louis: Distribution of Negro Population, Census of 1930. (Realtors’ Red
Line Map.)”. Missouri Historical Society, mohistory.org, 1934. Accessed March 21, 2019 at https://mohistory.org/collections/item/resource:221591.
64 James E. Ellis. “Anger Meets Study Denying Redlining Here. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 8, 1979:
19
An article that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from 1977, entitled “High Risk Area Complaints on Insurance Rates”, highlights the experience of Mr. and Mrs. Berman, whose racial and economic background are left unmentioned. Mrs. Berman describes the difficulty that she and her husband faced while searching for a company willing to provide insurance for their house in the redlined Lafayette Square neighborhood:
[…] The agent told us that we might have trouble renewing the policy next year. And then we’ll have to start our shopping all over again. Before we found [our current insurance company] Prudential, insurance agents were telling us that either they wouldn’t insure us, because we were in a high risk area, or else their rates were just too high. When we first moved into the house, we just carried over the policy we had in Baldwin for $101 a year. But when that expired we had to start shopping around. Our second year, we paid about $260 a year for just liability and fire insurance. That didn’t include theft. When we went to renew it, the rate had gone up to $400. It’s like we’re being penalized for living in the city. And we can’t afford that. 65
Viewed together, the reactions to the redlining study and the experience of the Bermans illustrate that both residents and politicians were well aware of the existence of redlining in St. Louis. However, in the political arena, enterprises that engaged in redlining successfully lobbied to keep the discussion about the existence of redlining alive in order to prevent concrete political action against it. As historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway have demonstrated, this is a commonly applied lobbying strategy, also employed in the controversies about global warming and the health impacts of tobacco smoking.66
The second policy that promoted racial segregation in St. Louis was zoning. Unlike redlining, which is carried out by private enterprises, zoning is an example of a public policy that can establish spatial segregation between different demographic groups. Tax income and the obligation to provide social security services gives municipalities much incentive to exclude the poor and attract the rich. In the middle years of the twentieth century, suburban municipalities across the United States began employing exclusionary zoning regulations (i.e., land use laws) for the realization of this objective. Measures such as reserving most or all of
65 Charlene Prost. “High-Risk Area Complaints on Insurance Rates”. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January
10, 1977: 8C. Accessed June 2, 2019 via newspapers.com.
66 Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured
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their land for low-density, single-family settlements; setting minimums for lot and building size; or prohibiting manufactured housing were mobilized to prevent the poor (which, in practice, were often black people or the elderly) from moving into suburbia. Instead, the poor were forced to live in older and higher density housing in central city areas that remained unprotected by zoning.
In many American cities, including St. Louis, zoning was an important cause for middle-class suburbanization, sprawling, and middle-class-based and racial segregation.67 In St. Louis, the role of zoning in the management of blight was already a topic of public debate in the 1940s. This is illustrated in an opinionated letter to the editor that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1946, in which an anonymous author protests against a measure that would authorize inner-city neighborhoods with multiple residence blocks between Kingshighway, Union, Lindell, and Delmar Boulevard. He or she argues that “the authorization of multiple-residence blocks in good single-residence areas has been the curse of St. Louis; it has driven tax values down and speeded the exodus of thousands of families into the county”.68 What the author leaves
unmentioned is the entanglement of race with anxieties about property values and tax base; black people were more likely to be poor and therefore live in multiple residence blocks. The presence of black people also drove down property values; therefore, exclusionary zoning was one way to keep them out.69
Similar anxieties rooted in the intersection of race and capital continued to fuel the debate about zoning up until the 1970s. This is exemplified in a dispute between a resident group called Citizens Against Rezoning and two private enterprises that wanted to build a discount store called Venture in the area between Interstate 270 and Olive Boulevard in West St. Louis County in 1977. In order to do so, the enterprises had persuaded the St. Louis County City Council to rezone the area for commercial development. An article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which appeared in the same year, highlights the experience of two residents of the area and members of the Citizens Against Rezoning group: Mr. and Mrs. Edward M. Peterson. Mr. Peterson expresses his concerns as follows:
You buy a home and stick your hard-earned money into it. You try to keep it up, and then somebody comes in next door and can do what they damn well please. It’s not how
67 Gordon, Mapping Decline, 112-113.
68 “To Halt Blight”. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 14, 1946: 4A. Accessed March 30, 2019 via
newspapers.com.
69 See also Rolf Pendall. “Local Land Use Regulation and the Chain of Exclusion”. Journal of the
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you expect good neighbors to act. These discount stores – they sell a lower quality merchandise at a lower price. Well, I’ll just come out and say it. They drag in a lower class of people.70
Again, race is left unmentioned. It is, however, hard not to equate Peterson’s formulation of a “lower class of people” with black people, if we view his reluctantly-made comment in the context of the white flight phenomenon (discussed below) that was affecting large parts of St. Louis and St. Louis County at the time. The important point is that the social location of black and white people alike was not only organized along a racial axis, but also inextricably intertwined with socioeconomic elements. This point should be of interest to cultural and social historians, because it facilitates understandings of distinctive group histories and experiences at the intersection of various systems of oppression and power (race and class, but also gender and nationality).71
The third and final policy that promoted racial segregation in St. Louis was blockbusting. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, many residential districts in American cities underwent a rapid racial change, with inhabitant populations transitioning from being almost exclusively white to being predominantly black. This phenomenon was invariably the result of a massive exodus of whites to newly built suburbs (the so-called ‘white flight’). White flight heavily affected St. Louis. This is reflected in the overall census data of St. Louis City between 1950 and 1980, which shows a steady percentage-wise decline in white population, as well as (up until 1970) a steady percentage-wise increase in black population:
70 Jeff Gelles. “How ‘Mini-West Port’ Became Discount Store”. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November
21, 1977: 1, 4. Accessed June 1, 2019 via newspapers.com.
71 Patricia Hill Collins. “Intersections of Race, Class, Gender, and Nation; Some Implications for
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Year Total Population White (% of total) Black (% of total)
1950 856796 702384 (82) 153766 (17.9)
1960 750026 543004 (71.2) 214377 (28.6)
1970 622236 364992 (58.7) 254191 (40.9)
1980 453085 242576 (53.5) 206386 (45.6)
Population census data for city of St. Louis. Source: US Census Bureau72
Within the city, moreover, the white flight pattern materialized much more strongly north of Delmar Boulevard than south of it.73
Real estate agents (so-called ‘blockbusters’) sometimes actively stimulated white flight through the practice of ‘blockbusting’. By promoting a fear of black people moving into a neighborhood and driving down property values, they convinced white homeowners to sell their property at low cost. If one homeowner sold their property, the value of other properties on the block would decrease, which then created a vicious cycle of neighboring homeowners selling at low costs in fear of further devaluation, until the whole block was ‘busted’. Blockbusters then sold the houses on the block at much higher prices to black people who wanted to desperately move out of slums and public housing projects.74
It is well established that residents of cities in which blockbusting occurred had a degree of awareness of the practice.75 While blockbusting created new housing opportunities for black people, the perception of blockbusting among blacks and whites alike is usually portrayed as altogether negative. For example, historian W. Edward Orser writes on blockbusting in Baltimore that “interpretations [of blockbusting] differed, particularly for those on the two sides of the racially dividing experience, as did assignments of responsibility and blame[,] but common to all was a sense of social dynamics that seemed beyond individual control and a sense of disjunction”.76 Similarly, historian Kevin Fox Gotham writes that “blockbusting
represented an insidious practice that was turning back the clock in the progress on race
72 Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung. “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to
1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States”. US Census Bureau, Census.gov, 2005. Accessed March 21, 2019, at:
https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0076/twps0076.html
73 See the visualizations of white flight in Gordon, Mapping Decline, 24, 26-30. These demonstrate
clearly that white flight was much more pronounced on the north side of Delmar Boulevard.
74 W. Edward Orser. Blockbusting in Baltimore: The Edmondson Village Story. Lexington: The
University Press of Kentucky, 1994, IX.
75 Kevin Fox Gotham. Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development: The Kansas City Experience,
1900-2010. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014: 109.
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relations” to the readers of a local black newspaper in Kansas City.77 However, a brief glance
at some primary sources suggests that blockbusting received a mixed, rather than purely negative, reaction. For example, one blockbuster from Chicago, in an interview delivered to the Saturday Evening Post in 1962, construed his enterprise as an effort to promote racial equality:
If you are an average white citizen, with average prejudices, you may regard all this as the ruin of metropolitan neighborhoods. I think of it merely as more business for what already is a growth industry. My attitude stems from the fact that few white neighborhoods welcome Negroes who can afford to buy there; yet the need for homes for Negroes keeps growing. I assist in the solution of this problem. My function, which might be called a service industry, is to drive the whites from a block whether they want it or not, then move the Negroes in.78
While this justification may be partly interpreted as a simple rationalization of immoral behavior, the view that blockbusting was advantageous to minorities was more common. In an analytic editorial that appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on December 24, 1969, journalist John Herbers writes the following about blockbusting in St. Louis:
For expanding minority groups, blockbusting has a positive aspect. It provides housing that would not otherwise be available. […] Some Negro real estate operators would have no business under the current market if it were not for the process of white neighborhoods turning black.79
In brief, blockbusting was a more dividing issue than it is usually portrayed to be. While it was certainly perceived as detrimental to the health of the city as a whole, the nature of its effect on minorities remained a topic of discussion.
Having discussed the constitutive practices of redlining, zoning, and blockbusting, the remainder of this chapter will focus on the impact that the Delmar Divide had on the personal lives of residents whose neighborhoods’ demographic and economic makeup shifted quickly.
77 Gotham, Race, Real Estate, and Uneven Development, 110.
78 Norris Vitcheck. “Confessions of a Block-Buster”. In Christopher W. Wells (ed.). Environmental
Justice in Postwar America: A Documentary Reader. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018: 43 (42-48)
79 John Herbers. “Housing Shortage Leads to Upturn in Blockbusting”. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dec
24
For one thing, residents of changing neighborhoods were forced to navigate the stigma that newly accompanied their zip codes. For instance, Patrick J. Kleaver, a white resident of the Old North St. Louis neighborhood during its transformation in the 1960s and 1970s, in his memoir Growing Up in North St. Louis (2012), repeatedly stresses the impact of the ‘blighted district’ designation that Old North St. Louis received in 1968. He implies that this designation, which would qualify the area for federal funding for urban redevelopment, ended up working as a self-fulfilling prophecy:
The next President whose policies negatively affected Old North was Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s. […] in 1968, the neighborhood was declared a ‘Model City’ area and we were told we now lived in the ‘Murphy Blair District’. […] With the name we also found out we were living in a ‘slum’ all this time (although we never felt like we lived in one). We viewed ourselves as a middle class (albeit, maybe, with a ‘low’ middle income) neighborhood and jokingly said we lived in ‘Lower Ladue’. As a result of this designation, we began to notice that when a house became vacant, no matter what condition it was in, it was immediately torn down.80
Why would officials designate Old North St. Louis as ‘blighted’ if its residents did not experience the area as such? This is because the neighborhood was located near St. Louis’s central business district (CBD). It was of considerable interest to the private enterprises located in this CBD to clear the residential neighborhoods that surrounded their offices and to replace them for further business development, as this would create space for expansion of headquarters and make the CBD as a whole more attractive to investors. Local urban planning officials were also attracted to such plans, because they believed that more economic activity would improve the general vitality of the city. Redevelopment, they believed, needed to consist of more than merely replacing blight with subsidized housing; it needed also to attract an entrepreneurial response. As a result, areas that received the ‘blighted’ designation, which was necessary to receive federal funding for slum clearance and urban redevelopment, were not necessarily the areas declining most profoundly and observably. Instead, they were frequently areas that had some problems, but could still be expected to attract private investors during the redevelopment process. Officials used two strategies to justify these designations. Often, they would stretch
80 Patrick J. Cleaver. Growing Up in Old North St. Louis. St. Louis: Patrick J. Cleaver, 2012/2018:
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the definition of blight (the federal government had delegated the defining of blight to the individual states, and, in practice, local officials had considerable freedom in determining what counted as blighted). They would also stretch the redevelopment area itself; the larger the area, the easier it was to find blighted conditions inside it.81
In reality, these officials created a stigma through which urban decline was socially constructed and reinforced.82 Thus, rather than paving the way for successful redevelopment, the ‘blight’ designation created a perception of decline, which then engendered more depopulation and, in extension thereof, actual, observable economic decline and physical decay. More broadly, the stigmatization of neighborhoods such as Old North St. Louis embodies a wider, cultural division that materialized along with the quantifiable economic and racial dichotomy along Delmar Boulevard. Today, for many inhabitants of South City, North City is considered a ‘no go area’. To them, the latter is known primarily through local news reports about crime.83
Conversely, inhabitants of North City too have a profound understanding of the meaning of their place of living within the city’s cultural geography. For instance, Debra J. Dickerson, a journalist and lawyer who grew up in a poor black family in North City during the 1960s and 1970s, writes the following about her youth in her memoir An American Story (2001):
On the other side of the Clark station was Kingshighway Avenue, running the length of the city north to south. We were very economical in our approach to it – we only used its northern end. To the south lay white St. Louis, as completely off-limits to us as if there were a second Grand Canyon, there where Kingshighway crossed Forest Park. No one had to warn me to stay out of the south side just as no one had to warn me not to touch a hot stove. I didn’t really understand that whites lived there, just that we couldn’t.84
Dickerson’s statement, as well as the other personal experiences referenced above, reveal that the Delmar Divide is as much a cultural code as a separation between two incommensurable
81 Colin Gordon. “Blighting the Way: Urban Renewal, Economic Development, and the Elusive
Definition of Blight”. Fordham Urban Law Journal, 31.2 (2004): 305-337.
82 This phenomenon is further explored in Robert J. Sampson and Stephen W. Raudenbush. “Seeing
Disorder: Neighborhood Stigma and the Social Construction of ‘Broken Windows’”. Social Psychology Quarterly, 67.4 (2004): 319-342.
83 Trivers and Rosenthal, “A Picture”, 199.
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economic and political realms. The structural analyses of the urban crisis in St. Louis that are discussed in the introduction of this thesis, on the other hand, reveal economic and political boundaries but not the cultural divide that accompanies them.
This is but one of the various insights and suggestions that the memoirs and newspaper articles examined in this chapter yield. It has also become clear that, unlike the existing historiography’s suggestion that the discriminatory practices which helped constitute racial segregation occurred under the radar, the public was aware of these practices, and that affected residents actively resisted them. Furthermore, the examined memoirs and newspaper articles have generated three individual suggestions about redlining, zoning, and blockbusting. Thus, my investigation of civil and entrepreneurial reactions to redlining suggests that the political controversies surrounding the existence of redlining were consciously forged through lobbying on the part of private enterprises that engaged in redlining themselves. Moreover, my analysis of the Citizens Against Rezoning controversy suggests that discriminatory zoning was not exclusively motivated by racial dynamics, but rather by a complex entanglement of racial and socioeconomic factors. Finally, the existing historiography suggests that blockbusting was perceived as detrimental by blacks and whites alike. Both the blockbuster from Chicago and St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor John Herbers, however, testified that they viewed the practice as beneficial to racial dynamics.
Collectively, these insights illustrate that the existing, structuralist accounts of the urban crisis are shaped by, even produced through, a specific choice of source material. Different source material, such as the memoirs and newspaper articles explored here, can provide new perspectives and inspire revisions of existing accounts. More examples of this principle are provided in the next chapter, in which racial dynamics again form the central theme, but in a different setting: that of St. Louis’s public housing.
27 CH. 2: PUBLIC HOUSING: PRUITT-IGOE
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, many American cities, including St. Louis, experienced an expansion of slums in the inner city, In response to this problem, the Truman administration introduced the Housing Act of 1949, which established a national housing objective and provided federal aid to cities for slum-clearance and low-rent public housing projects.85 In the following years, St. Louis made use of this measure to finance the clearance of several blighted neighborhoods and the construction of several public housing projects, including the Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and the William Igoe Apartments in Mill Creek Valley. Collectively known as Pruitt-Igoe, these projects consisted of 2,870 apartments divided over thirty-three eleven-story apartment buildings, concentrated on a fifty-seven-acre site. It was originally intended for both white and black residents, segregated into different buildings. It was designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki and stood on St. Louis’s north side, where it was completed in 1955.86
A 1950 opinionated article in a local newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reflects the philosophy behind public housing initiatives like Pruitt-Igoe. In a highly optimistic, technocratic fashion - typical of the prevailing zeitgeist of high modernism – journalist Richard G. Baumhoff argues that the problem of “blight” and “progressively worsening slums” can be addressed through the realization of new “neighborhood patterns”.87 These patterns would
consist of newly built apartment buildings in residential areas separate from commerce and industry and in close vicinity to highways, public transport, parking areas, parks, and playgrounds:
Within this pattern there would be no more slums, at last a minimum of blight. Instead, incentive for owners and users of homes and stores to keep them in good repair and appearance. Apartments and flats with plenty of light and air and green surroundings. Single dwellings on decent-sized lots, laid out to fit modern styles and shapes, no longer in archaic gridirons.88
85 “Housing Act of 1949”. In David Goldfield. Encyclopedia of American Urban History. Thousand
Oaks/London/New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2007: 356-357.
86 Lawrence H. Larsen. History of Missouri, Vol. 4: 1953-2003. Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 2004: 61-63.
87 For an explanation of high-modern and technocratic tendencies in the architecture of the
mid-twentieth century, see Mary McLeod. “’Architecture or Revolution’: Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change”. Art Journal, 43.2 (1983): 137-147.
88 Richard G. Baumhoff. “Progress or Decay? St. Louis Must Choose”. St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
March 5, 1950. Accessed March 25 2019 at:
28
Baumhoff conceived of this solution well aware of the racial imbalance in contemporary housing and poverty issues. He argues that these new residential patterns will provide “sincere recognition of the rights and needs of Negroes as American citizens – decent, pleasant housing; ample recreation; a chance to live normal, self-supporting lives in human dignity”.89
Fig. 2: One of the Pruitt-Igoe buildings in 1954, shortly after its completion.90
89 Baumhoff, “Progress or Decay?”.
90 Henry T. Mizuki. “Pruitt-Igoe”. Missouri Historical Society, mohistory.org, 1954. Accessed June
